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Lem's Opinion

I wrote Star Diaries, stories that contain stories, in the course of 48 years. At first they were quite improbable because of their purely grotesque and humorous character. With time this grotesque started to be accompanied by cognitive concepts related to theology and answers to the question: what would human beings do if there were no limits to genes' composition? This idea was assisted by an array of most bizarre skeletons. As literary critics pointed out I turned from "pure inventions of Münchausen" to more serious concepts related to Swift's Gulliver and Voltaire, albeit still in a grotesque form. This volume discusses also many other topics, since I always had the tendency to write fiction that was a "general theory of everything".

The resemblance of Ijon Tichy, the hero of Star Diaries, to baron Münchausen or Gulliver was not a conscious act of the author - there were no theoretical premises or assumptions. I was not searching for any form of prototype, pattern or paradigm - just as the river does not anticipates its riverbed. My works "wrote themselves" - I turned into a form of a "rationally working medium" and I never processed plans related to my undertakings.

The censorship banned publication of certain parts of this book in the Soviet Union and in other East European countries but I never considered this fact to be important.